AR boss Pötsch is said to have discussed the question of extending CEO Diess with key players at the weekend.
In the power struggle at Volkswagen, the Supervisory Board has brought its meeting planned for this week forward. The committee should meet on Monday evening to find a solution to the conflict over an early contract extension for CEO Herbert Diess, said a person familiar with the discussions at the Reuters news agency. Another person confirmed the meeting.
One of the insiders said that supervisory board chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch had further talks with the most important players over the weekend. Initially, no comments were received from Volkswagen. Originally, the supervisory board should not meet again until Thursday.
Last week, the supervisory body had only brought a scheduled meeting forward to Wednesday evening in order to find a way out of the leadership crisis. However, the meeting was adjourned after a short time because no rapprochement appeared.
According to insiders, CEO Diess insisted on an early extension of his contract, which runs until 2023, and links this with demands for the appointment and the design of executive board positions. Large parts of the supervisory board felt blackmailed as a result. It was criticized that the highest employee of the group wanted to give instructions to the control council.
“He wants all or nothing,” said one person with knowledge of the deliberations.
The 62-year-old Diess has made it clear several times that he wants to break up what he sees as the encrusted structures in Wolfsburg and make Volkswagen more flexible in order to survive the transformation of the industry. Repeatedly there was a dispute with General Works Council chief Bernd Osterloh, from whose point of view Diess was acting self-glorious. Audi works council chief Peter Mosch told the “Augsburger Allgemeine” last week, however, that he expected Diess to be willing to compromise. “Nobody wants this to stop.” There are no demands on the employee side that the Volkswagen boss should leave early. “We want to continue working with Diess for the next few years,” said Mosch, who is also on the Volkswagen supervisory board. However, an early extension of the contract is not an option.
Diess narrowly escaped dismissal at the beginning of June after accusing the board of directors of “criminal acts” at a management conference. At that time, his wish for a new contract had become public through a magazine report. As a result, Diess had to apologize to the supervisory board, but lost responsibility for the main VW brand, which he had previously managed alongside his duties as CEO.
Group experts suspect that he perceived this as disempowerment and is therefore pushing all the more for a contract extension as a vote of confidence that the supervisory board will support him in the restructuring. This is also about further savings.
The former BMW manager came to Volkswagen in mid-2015 – a few weeks before the diesel scandal was uncovered by the US environmental authorities – and has been driving the switch to electric mobility ever since. Under his leadership as brand boss, the electrical construction kit MEB was created, on which the ID models developed by VW are based, with which the Wolfsburg-based company wants to overtake Tesla and become the largest electric car manufacturer. Experts are already expecting this in the coming year.
The board of directors recently provided Diess with a huge budget of 73 billion euros for future investments. The world's largest carmaker will invest 35 billion euros of this in new e-cars and the retrofitting of factories by 2025.
